Founder Profile: Tallyfy

I grew up and worked in the UK doing consulting in process improvement and operational efficiency for a ton of mid-size and large companies. Billions and billions are being spent by companies on making pointless (giant) flowcharts and huge, boring operations manuals which nobody ever looks at, let alone improves. Even if you “had” processes written down, the way you “did them” was a total mess of email, chat and even paper. It was obvious that a simple way to document and “launch” processes to track their status in real-time was needed, for any size of team. Imagine how awesome it would be if you never had to ask anyone how to do something routine, and you always knew who was doing what, when and how at work. Chat and email tell you what (has) happened before. Processes tell you that plus what is going to happen next.

I strongly believe that the future of human productivity lies in three things – continuous improvement, digitizing tribal knowledge and eliminating “busywork questions.” Tallyfy gets your business out of your brain so that your business can run on auto-pilot. You might call these systems, habits, SOP’s, processes or playbooks. Tallyfy lets you document and track all those things so that everyone knows exactly what to do, and how and when to do it. Repeatable processes are the only things that scale, and the only things that can be compared like-for-like (with machine learning) and the one idea that’s massively under-used and misunderstood today. There’s so much hype around AI, yet little or no hype about repeatable processes, which built most of the largest companies on the planet today.

Great question. We’re very lucky. Despite the breadth of industries, we’ve seen little or no scope-creep in our roadmap. There are very few feature requests we see that we haven’t seen before. The table stakes for what we need to build are nice and predictable. For features that are exotic, our API-first architecture enables us to integrate with point solutions nicely, or via fast-growing middleware players like Microsoft Flow and Zapier. We’ve also laid out awesome plans to keep our core product super-lean and “one-size-fits-all” while being able to ensure add-ons can be bolted on to the UI as well as the API (serverless) for exotic or one-off needs. We just launched a native add-on for Slack – with Gmail, Outlook and Teams coming soon.

What we’ve built so far is published on the changelog. For competitive reasons we can’t say too much, but what’s coming next is both obvious and magically awesome. We’re going to fill the gaps around event-driven systems that many have missed. We’re also working on the world’s first and simplest wearable solution that lets you capture and recall any process by voice (without using your hands), the Tallyfy Wearable. Right now we focus on desk jobs, but there’s a huge market for people who don’t have their hands free, like on oil and gas facilities. Our future roadmap fits our (trademarked) vision – “Workflow Made Easy.” If it doesn’t make workflow or repeatable processes easier, we’re not building it. That vision works everywhere, not just for screens.

Many companies have no system, so we don’t normally see this issue. Most people use Word, Google Docs and flowcharts to document their processes, so that’s the only potential transition. It helps that we’re slightly “unfashionable.” I would hate to be a “marketing automation” startup right now, where there’s hundreds of apps that all look the same as each other – and giving up one system for another, is often not worth it. Our onboarding is essentially about getting customers to realize the value of saving money (automation) and making money (through better client experiences).

As seasoned professionals who actually practiced process improvement, our edge is our deep know-how in this space, along with the BPM (Business Process Management) category. Many people starting companies in this space think that this is basically about project management or to-do apps. We’re design-first and deeply technical (I’m a Computer Science grad). This means we’re going to win from having a beautiful, richer product that’s built from truly understanding customer needs, not from temporary hustling and sales. Most of the competition also does not get >$450k worth of organic, inbound search traffic per month. Ads on Google search are really expensive, and it’s great that we’re not paying a dime. We intend to double-down on providing fantastic, evergreen content to drive value and education. In terms of security, we’re one of the only workflow product vendors in the world that properly validates with HSTS in all major browsers.

We’ve received massive amounts of feedback, some of which we’ve published on our customers page. Every time we hear a specific feature request for the 20th time – we prioritize thinking about building it in the right way, while keeping the product lean. We publish a changelog that’s moving really quickly, due to all this feedback. Some customers spent many hours helping us translate the Tallyfy UI into other languages (for free). It’s the ultimate compliment, when a customer loves you so much that they’re willing to spend >7 hours to translate your app to the language of their choice!

Yes, that’s partially what we found. Most of all we noticed no urgency to convert on the freemium model, or the “free forever” plan. In the early days we thought “Slack has a free plan,” so we copied the model. We’ve learned a lot since then and evolved quickly. One big move we just made was introducing the “Docs” plan, where you just document your processes, which is very low-cost. We think monetization early is also a great move to justify the value of what we’re offering. Some people think “there must be a catch” with something free, so de-valuing our offering that way wasn’t working.

We had little to no focus on “formal” customer success and business development, although we’ve always been ridiculously close to customers. Along with some of the funds going into product to build a few remaining features on our roadmap much of the funding is likely to head into business development and conversion to grow MRR, in whatever form that might take – tooling, people, data, etc. Mostly, our costs are people.

We’ve already been approached by a lot of large and interested parties. You never really know if they’re fishing around for information/ideas or genuinely interested. The most interesting ones are of course, people who need us as a complementary fit to their offerings. The least interesting are purely financial entities that are essentially looking to buy recurring revenue streams. For reasons of strategy and public disclosure, we’re not openly publishing those really nice fits/opportunities. There’s a bunch of opportunities down the road, and also, an IPO would be pretty awesome 🙂